raymac46 Posted June 5, 2020 Share Posted June 5, 2020 Mageia is the successor community distro to Mandrake/Mandriva and I can never work with it without remembering Bruno - the master Mandrake magician. I installed Mageia 7.1 in Virtualbox yesterday just to see how it looks and works in 2020. For the record I did use Mandriva during my distro hopping years and even installed it for a few of my Linux "clients." However I never really got into KDE 3.X and Mandriva's GNOME version was buggy so eventually I stopped using it. Mandriva fell upon hard times and most of its staff went off to build Mageia. You can install Mageia 7.1 in either GNOME3 or Plasma versions. I started out with GNOME but wasn't impressed with it here so I just trashed the VBox install and started over with Plasma. Much nicer look and feel, as Plasma is Mageia's flagship desktop. It wasn't easy to set up the Guest Additions which don't immediately work out of the box. I had to install dkms-virtualbox and then run the installation from the CD image. Finally got the Guest Additions working. The Plasma bottom panel didn't look right so I had to move some widgets around to get it functional. There's a lot of widgets stuff there that I wouldn't want to keep. Mageia still has the famous MCC control center which is a one stop shop for maintenance install config - you name it it's there. Mageia doesn't issue a new release all that often so there were a lot of updates needed and in fact the original Plasma desktop was pretty unstable. I had to go in with ICEwm and do the updates. Then everything was fine. I expect that eventually something will go wrong after an update and Mageia will fail to boot to the desktop. That has happened in the past with virtual installs. I'll keep it going until then. After using the fabulous pacman and even APT the Mandriva RPM system feels clunky and antiquated. Mind you I was using the gui. Maybe if I worked with the command line it would be better. The combination of VBox, RPM and the unfamiliar Qt apps isn't a pleasant one so I would not use Mageia as a daily driver - not even if you take virtualization out of the equation. Nor could I recommend it to new users since it took a while to get the desktop stable. It's nice for old times' sake though. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted June 5, 2020 Author Share Posted June 5, 2020 Here is how Mageia 7.1 Plasma looks in VBox. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted June 5, 2020 Author Share Posted June 5, 2020 And just to complete matters, here is a post from Chromium in Mageia 7.1 in VirtualBox on Windows 10. Now you know the rest of the story. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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